“Anybody can innovate. Don’t do this big ‘think different’… screw that. It’s meaningless. Ninety-nine per cent of it is get the work done.”

“All that hype is not where the real work is,” said Torvalds. “The real work is in the details.”

I sometimes disagree with Linus, especially in some of his correspondence with other humans, but he really has not let the success of Linux get to his head. His thoughts on subjects like this are always so refreshing.

Weirdly I’m not sure if I want Linus on Bad Voltage or not. He is clearly very closely tied to open source and the main author of the Kernel, by which I don’t know if he he has written the most code but I know it would not exist without him.

I have met him once and I may have been unlucky but got the feeling he was saying “how do we achieve what I want” a lot louder than he was saying “what do we want”.

I have met him once and I may have been unlucky but got the feeling he was saying “how do we achieve what I want” a lot louder than he was saying “what do we want”.

Although I agree at times he seems like he would be tough to work with. I think where what he wants can be proved technically incorrect or inferior, then he would entertain that. Given the success of Linux for such a long period, something must be said of his ability to manage, at least in terms of open source.

I’m not saying the success is down to him solely, far from it, but he has been at the helm all this time, and Linux must be one of most successful pieces of technology in this digital age?

Weirdly, I always admired him more for Git than Linux; he got that done pretty damn fast!

Not just the speed of it. The underlying technology that Git is built on is a wonderful example of how to design software. Come up with really clean components of the desigln, and then optimize the underlying code.

Some of the concepts in Git are so simple and powerful that operations like git branch can be achieved with copying a file.